Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Friday, October 21, 2016

RETURN TO MIDDLE EARTH FOR HARPER COLLINS

HarperCollins
is proud to announce the publication in May 2017 of BEREN AND LÚTHIEN by J.R.R.
Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien and illustrated by Alan Lee. The book
will be published simultaneously in the USA by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and in
other languages by numerous Tolkien publishers worldwide.

The tale of Beren and Lúthien was, or became, an
essential element in the evolution of The Silmarillion, the myths and
legends of the First Age of the World conceived by J.R.R. Tolkien. Returning
from France and the battle of the Somme at the end of 1916, he wrote the tale
in the following year.

Essential to the story, and never changed, is the fate
that shadowed the love of Beren and Lúthien: for Beren was a mortal man, but
Lúthien was an immortal Elf. Her father, a great Elvish lord, in deep
opposition to Beren, imposed on him an impossible task that he must perform
before he might wed Lúthien. This is the kernel of the legend; and it leads to
the supremely heroic attempt of Beren and Lúthien together to rob the greatest
of all evil beings, Melkor, called Morgoth, the Black Enemy, of a Silmaril.

In this book Christopher Tolkien has attempted to
extract the story of Beren and Lúthien from the comprehensive work in which it
was embedded; but that story was itself changing as it developed new
associations within the larger history. To show something of the process
whereby this legend of Middle-earth evolved over the years, he has told the
story in his father's own words by giving, first, its original form, and then passages
in prose and verse from later texts that illustrate the narrative as it
changed. Presented together for the first time, they reveal aspects of the
story, both in event and in narrative immediacy, that were afterwards lost.

Published on the tenth anniversary of the last
Middle-earth book, the Sunday Times and international Number One
Bestseller, The Children of Húrin, this new volume will similarly
include drawings and colour plates by Alan Lee, who also illustrated The
Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and went on to win an Academy Award
for his work on The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.